It wouldn't be difficult to study my menu for a few days and tailor your terrible plot to what I'm actually doing. For example, if you'd bought up all the vinegar so that I couldn't make sushi, I'd have been in trouble.

Oh yeah, I had some trouble beating you last time.

Lenard is ready to pack up, but Siela convinces him to stay and watch her enact her sweet revenge.

Of course there was. Fred's pretty sure Gustav is bribing ministers to get his way into the position as Royal Cook, giving him... uh, unprecedented authority and influence. Fred reminds Siela that it was her goal all along to become the Royal Cook, and... wait, was it? I thought she just wanted to be famous enough that she couldn't get evictmurdered out of her childhood home.

I thought I might talk to someone at the castle for some more details before the contest, but nobody's here like usual.

If a Water Fiend goes Berserk for the self-heal and stat boost, then follows with Avalanche, its most powerful spell? Watch out. It hurts.

The description is the helpful and descriptive "Banishes enemy". I haven't gotten it to work yet. I assume it's like the Death spell from Final Fantasy... except it never works.

So it's like the Death spell from Final Fantasy.

Alfine is losing weight from the Rose Cake, but doesn't think it's worth how sick it makes her feel. Ho hum, she'll have to try the old-fashioned way of exercising. Don't they have metabolism-balancing magic spells by now? Maybe that'll be her thesis.

That potential landslide we saw on Gilbert Pass has finally collapsed, leading the way to...

A dragon nest.

Only one new screen opens up, and all the encounters there I ran into were with three drakes. They're tough! They have strong physical hits, fire breath, and a Dragonfear attack that paralyzes the whole party. If that procs, reload from last save, because you're dead.

One of them went berserk in an early fight. That was scary.

And they resist fire, which I should have foreseen, honestly. Fred's spear is pretty useless here, but he can get through hitting them with Ice Lance, since that hits a row with ice-elemental damage regardless of the innate affinity of the weapon.

More often than not, drakes drop dick all.

The steal is a large healing potion, which... eh, okay. I can buy those if I need them.

Yeah, there we go. Eggs and meat. And seeds, but I don't really care much about those. Eggs and meat.

I'm gonna dragon the fuck out of that rice. It's gonna be so dragon'd.

Good defense, and drops the cost of spells by one. I give it to Alfine.

I don't know why, but the idea of dragon meat blows my mind a little. Ground dragon meat, even. Makes me feel like I do when I see my mother put perfectly good and tasty cuts of beef into her meat grinder, but much more so. At least these particular dragons don't seem like the sort you can have a conversation with, and given that they're random encounters they can't be near extinction.

The game doesn't have a Cooking stat or anything, so it's the usual "the same, but more" approach. All the food prep is just choosing from a list of ingredients, so the only way to chart progress is to use increasingly fantastic items.

Could you imagine a game where Siela has practiced so much with simple dishes that people line up around the block for a plate of scrambled (hen) eggs?

(Dragon Meat is spoiled pretty early on; Fred will sell it to you for real-world cash.)

I went back to Gilbert Pass. I fought drakes for what seemed like forever. I went home, cooked a bunch of new recipes I ran out of dragon eggs and couldn't do before, and no new hint recipes unlocked from my mastery of the ol' oeuf-de-dragon.

Since I have over 400k in walking-around money, everyone ate their fill of the new stuff. Drabonara is delicious. Siela is now level 48, Alfine and Fred 46, and everyone else 45. Nothing seems to have happened for reaching Bar Rank 10, and may not until the next Master-level tournament in a few days. I guess that's time enough to get a menu of Dragon Risotto, Deluxe Pizza, and King Crab Maki together.

The walk through Gilbert Pass (or "Gilbert's Path" on the map, given Japanese ambiguity for L and R) gives me a couple of Garuda Eggs on my way to and from the drake nest. I've been feeding people Garbonara to level them. When I was going to Fire Island to fish for King Crab and hunt Stungus for Blackshrooms, I was feeding everyone sushi made out of the Sea Urchins I also got there. And before that, grinding at Otts Lake for salmon usually gave me enough Sea Bream and Tuna to come up with something.

Until the day I realized I had over $400,000 in my pocket, said "fuck it" to bar sales, and fed everyone dragon risotto. I think Siela leveled something like six times in one day. I'll probably do that again once I finish this drake hunt run. I kind of don't care about the limits on how much people can eat in a day, because cabbages are easy to find, and as long as your Satiety isn't 99 you can not forget to eat food to level up. Eat a huge plate of dragonflesh risotto, drink a glass of cabbage juice, eat an entire truffle-and-crab pizza, drink a glass of cabbage juice, eat some sushi, drink a glass of cabbage juice...

Smoke Wood is available for sale at Ostenlein (as is cheese). But swap the cheese out for pork and you can make Crispy Bacon, worth five times the EXP. Otts Trout (which you may be rolling in from journeys to Otts Lake, I know I am) can be smoked and eaten for almost as many EXP as Crispy Bacon. If you have Otts Water to spare, try Mushroom Pork or Royal Ice Au Lait. Creme Pasta with either bacon or tuna ain't bad.

I make all those recipes I mentioned last time but didn't have the dragonflesh to finish.

Fred gives Siela a necklace, b-but he's not doing it because he likes her or anything, okay?! It's a Siela-exclusive equip that increases her defenses and luck a little, and keeps her from being targeted by enemy attacks.

With dragon dishes served, money is no longer an issue. It hasn't been for a while, but we're at that point that comes in the late-midgame of all RPGs.

There's some hope for Alfine yet! I made her another Rose Cake, but there's no event after this one.

I somehow completely missed that the Guid stall has recipes for sale. Imagine my surprise to learn that the screenshot doesn't have a typo, and the dish is actually Anglicized as "Jjigae".

Making Tofu Jjigae unlocked Fire Jjigae. I have now discovered that many dishes that call for Red Spice can be improved by adding Fire Spice instead.

I knew it was in the game somewhere, dammit! I just forgot that Napa is an ingredient, and kept trying to make it with green cabbage instead. Fire Kimchi uses Fire Spice instead of Red Spice, of course; Daikon/Daikon Fire and Cucumber/Cucumber Fire Kimchi shortly follow.

No surprise there.

Hot damn, that's the drop from Water Fiends! It matches the Wind Ring, Earth Ring, and Fire Ring I already have: +50 to the element resist and +10 to one stat, in this case Intelligence.

...is your one task for the entire game to tell me to bake an apple pie? Honestly?

I don't know what that icon is, but I think Elias just learned the game's top non-elemental spell. Like Final Fantasy's... uh, Meteor.

The regular Ma Po recipes don't improve with the addition of Fire Spice, unless you also replace the pork with dragon meat.

I thought this might be the next event unlock! But no, it's just Lidia talking about her family again once Selia notices her memento. Her mom died, her dad's in prison on account of being a thief.

Good thing, too, because the guy from Cassel Garden is a legit threat.

But nothing plot-related will happen until I win first place at least one more time.

(Hint: it's even tastier with Platinum Tuna.)

Fried octopus? Whatever happened to that guy, anyway?

This guy's really enthusiastic about sea urchins, and gives a few more tips on how to prepare them since all I know how to do is maki-sushi. Turns out you don't need anything at all, just an urchin and a knife.

Oden, huh? That's... not much of a hint. But Google helps! The Wikipedia article for Oden lists the main ingredients as hardcooked eggs and daikon, and that's it exactly. Oden's a winter-season stew and this is the middle of June, though, so I wouldn't count on selling much of it. I feel like I'm pretty near endgame now that I'm running in the Master-class cooking contests, though... does the game really go on all the way into winter months?

Cooking Oden unlocks the "Sumo Pot", which is obviously Chankonabe.

So... back to killing dragons and eating their flesh, waiting for the next cooking contest to come around. Updates may be sparse for a while, partly because it takes a lot of play to get through ten days, and partly because spending those ten days grinding out dragons is goddamn boring.

I've found 95.9% of the game's ingredients. There's a blank on the list in the section on meats, between Tung and Ground Chicken, so there's a new kind of creature to go out and kill somewhere. What could be tastier than dragons? The remaining ingredients are the last four on the list, so I assume they're fantastic or semimagical event ingredients, like the Misto Plant.

I have 96.7% of the game's recipes. The blanks are:At the end of the "Bomb" list, just before the Salted Vegetables group. Probably one last kind of in-battle item I'll never use.Between BLT at the end of the sandwiches list and Sliced Apple, so probably <last meat item> between bread slices.Between Tung Creme and Sumo-Pot, so probably <last meat item> in Creme Sauce.Under Fire Jjigae, before Salmon Crab Pot. A stew of some sort, which doesn't narrow much down.Between the Beef and Tuna steaks entries, so <last meat item> pan-fried.Between Grilled Tung and Fried Rice, so... <last meat item> grilled.In the middle of the Fried Rice entries, between Crab and Butter Rice.There are four blanks between Meat Pie and Pizza. I should experiment more with pies, it seems. I didn't get a single hint recipe for them throughout all the acquisition of seafood, but... seafood pie? Fish pies are traditionally British, so I didn't expect them to be included.The very last recipe on the list, which I'm assuming is endgame/event, possibly made of the final four ingredients I haven't found yet. One way or the other, I'm glad to be done with the game's seemingly-infinite variations on sushi.

I only have 10% of the game's combos, but the game is pretty stingy about hints regarding those, and... I kind of don't care, because I have all the money I need without any sales boosts.

For all that, I've only fought 50% of the game's monsters. Given the grouping in the monsters section, I'm expecting two more kinds of slime, another "plant" creature, two more wolves, two more bats, a boar, another sort of mushroom, four more elemental spirits, another cabbage-ish sort of thing, two more crabs clubs, four more Fiends, another sort of cow, another giant bird, another giant, another worm, three more kinds of dragons, and a dozen or so boss monsters like the Goliath, the Wind Slayer, or Almer Baron. There are a few big chunks of blank spaces near the end, so it's not implausible there's a type of monster I just haven't met yet. Presumably it's whatever I can kill for the last kind of meat. I assume the last monsters will either start dropping more potions and equipment or stop screwing around with buyable ingredients and exclusively drop the useful stuff. Like, I don't know where I'll find the last mushroom monster, but I expect it to drop Blackshooms as its common or uncommon, rather than its rare like the Stungus does.

The walk through Gilbert Pass (or "Gilbert's Path" on the map, given Japanese ambiguity for L and R) gives me a couple of Garuda Eggs on my way to and from the drake nest. I've been feeding people Garbonara to level them. When I was going to Fire Island to fish for King Crab and hunt Stungus for Blackshrooms, I was feeding everyone sushi made out of the Sea Urchins I also got there. And before that, grinding at Otts Lake for salmon usually gave me enough Sea Bream and Tuna to come up with something.

Until the day I realized I had over $400,000 in my pocket, said "fuck it" to bar sales, and fed everyone dragon risotto. I think Siela leveled something like six times in one day. I'll probably do that again once I finish this drake hunt run. I kind of don't care about the limits on how much people can eat in a day, because cabbages are easy to find, and as long as your Satiety isn't 99 you can not forget to eat food to level up. Eat a huge plate of dragonflesh risotto, drink a glass of cabbage juice, eat an entire truffle-and-crab pizza, drink a glass of cabbage juice, eat some sushi, drink a glass of cabbage juice...

Smoke Wood is available for sale at Ostenlein (as is cheese). But swap the cheese out for pork and you can make Crispy Bacon, worth five times the EXP. Otts Trout (which you may be rolling in from journeys to Otts Lake, I know I am) can be smoked and eaten for almost as many EXP as Crispy Bacon. If you have Otts Water to spare, try Mushroom Pork or Royal Ice Au Lait. Creme Pasta with either bacon or tuna ain't bad.

Oh, I have plenty of food...I'm just feeding everyone smoked cheese on principle.

After my most recent trip to the drake nest, I gave every food item I cooked to Siela rather than sharing it evenly over the entire party. Siela rocketed from level 52 to level 78. (When I got to the drake's nest for the first time, everyone was in the low forties. Dragon dishes are worth a lot of EXP.)

My goal was to get Siela to oneshot the drakes with Sword Dance. She can't, but oneshotting them with Over Kill doesn't lead to more drops. I'm better off using Sword Dance to soften them all up, then have Fred and Alter join in on using Butcher to finish them off.

I'm basically burning time while waiting for my next rank 10 contest, so I'm mostly skipping days/going to Ostenlein to acquire more delicious dairy. I have 99 of at least a dozen 1k+ dishes as well as a smattering of expensive dishes. If only I could make a golden cheese...